Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Babies everywhere!

MAINTAIN HUMANITY UNDER 500,000,000
IN PERPETUAL BALANCE WITH NATURE
- First Sentence of the Georgia Guidestones
We like to make people. Lots of them. In many parts of the world, you are not a human being until you've had a child. Most of my Jamaican friends, while not the best of fathers, speak with pride about their "seeds." Like animals enslaved to Darwin's edict, we are but dancers on the floor of evolution. For some, propagating our species is perhaps the meaning of life.

Yet we are steadily reaching the point at which we cannot sustain all of our bodies on this planet. To think that we can is unwillingly hopeful and to think that we can continue to increase our population and still not impact our surroundings may be a tad ignorant. It would be fantastic if we could, but it seems we cannot. Not with the way we are living now. We'd have to change a great deal.

Yet who has the right, or even the initiative to say that we should curb the amount of beings we bring into this world. Surely, we've all heard stories about China and the measures they go through to attempt such goals. Granted, some of the stories are true and some of them are not. The effect that these measurements have has been small. There are places all over the world that are currently experiencing a population explosion. For a country such as ours, which has a population insignificant to the amount or resources at our disposal, the torrent of questions somehow do not seem as prudent.

Murkiest of these waters is the question of abortion. Could you imagine a world in which every pregnancy was carried to it's fruition? Can you imagine the world which bid riddance to every pregnancy that was wished to be terminated. The issue raises great personal feelings to be sure. Moral or not, this particular issue is also not a very directed one, it seeks to distract us from the real question. Should we confront population increase or not?

Could it possibly be that somehow people all over this globe could come to some consensus on how we should go about the increase of our species? Should people be given complete choice in how many children they wish to bear? Does an assembly like the United Nations, or even our elected officials have a right to broach such matters?

I fear the question may be too large to answer.
Perhaps you've already answered it yourself.



2 comments:

Freilly said...

There's something fishy about the whole birth control thing, in my opinion. The last time I checked pregnancy was more or less a two person job - two genders, and yet the whole thing about harnessing fertility seems to be captured in the small pill that apparently liberates women. And then we get these continual news reports which horrifically describe how these the food products, such as garbonzo beans, and habits, such as smoking pot, lower sperm counts in men (and women too, I would imagine). I think we should kick the pills and encourage the consumption of chick peas and canabis to overly populated areas. Perhaps some hormonal beef too as that seems to be a reoccuring issue.

BattyMcDougall said...

Chick peas and pot?
I'd be all over that hummus.